How do detect my mood this past month

It's pretty easy these days to tell how I'm feeling. Is Gordon eating? Yes? I'm happy! Is Gordon not eating? I'm going to cry any minute.

Gordon, my cat, is one of my favorite living beings on the planet. I love that little guy so much my heart feels like it's all Gordon some days. So when he fainted started losing weight this summer, I couldn't get over my horrible feeling that something was terribly wrong even though the vet could not detect any discernible problem. When I got back from my two-month stint in Baltimore - which is the longest I've ever been separated from Gordon - he was scary skinny. I finally took him to the vet when there was blood in his poo. He was diagnosed with colon cancer. Luckily, the cancer hadn't spread which I still have a hard time believing given the amount of time the it went untreated. Therefore, we (we meaning Chris) spend an ungodly amount of money having the tumor removed. He seems to be doing well, all things considered. But he's a more picky eater these days and the cat food I've been feeding him is of inconsistent quality. So, some days he eats and I think he'll live another 2 years. Other days he doesn't, and I prepare for his imminent demise at any moment.

It's really hard to watch someone you love die. That Gordon can't tell me how he feels and that I can't tell him that one batch of food is different from the other so stop looking at me with those big eyes as if I've purposefully taken away all that is delicious in the world and that I can't know when the tumor is returning... all of these things absent the power of language to communicate with him means that I watch Gordon like a hawk in order to figure out which moment will be the one where I have to decide whether I should continue his life or not. Already, one must intuitively communicate with their pets meaning that the relationship is very deep - if you let it be.

Living with this new reality is really hard. One's relationship with their companion animal is an incredibly intimate and personal one. I have lived with Gordon for over 11 years. I can barely remember a time without him in my everyday existence. As the years have passed, our relationship has grown quite deep and we know each other well. I am so devastated by the fact that sooner, rather than later, this beautiful little creature will slip out of my life.

And so I focus on his eating habits. Gordon eating? Happy Heather. Gordon not eating? Crumpled grieving mess Heather.

academia is lonely

I am reading and reading and reading about mobilizations and lost times and communalism and here I am, all alone. I could have gone up the street and read with my friend Matt, but I didn't. I'm too sad. He's wonderful but I don't know him that well and I'm feeling really porous right now.

I'm finishing off the red wine that honors the 120 patriots who helped lead Chile to independence and wondering about the state and thinking, we want to figure out ways to organize ourselves outside the purview of the neoliberal nation-state and most people can't decide that a Wal-Mart is a bad thing to have in one's neighborhood. It makes me so sad.

Murray Bookchin, who I am reading now, is really sad about the single-issue activism that pervades leftist movements. Funny thing is, I would say that any other kind of organizing has made itself apparent to me outside of the last, well, couple of years or so. I never thought to think big to think that capitalism itself can be organized against. I guess summit protests were that kind of thinking big. I knew about it I guess, but it just seemed like such bygone era. And to some extent it is. But I'm so hopeful and disappointed at the same time.

Mostly I'm disappointed in myself. Like, I don't try hard enough. Nothing feels like enough. And maybe it shouldn't ever and that's precisely why the work continues. Radical and revolutionary social movement building, to me, seems so mired in ideology or guilt or meanness. I shouldn't say this. But I can't stop thinking about how movement building works and what kinds of methods folks want to employ to win folks over. What does it take not only to attract people but to KEEP them?

Maybe I am getting ahead of myself. If my students are any indication of the work that is to be done, it is first and foremost - oh, I don't know. Teaching them how to think or hold onto a thought for more than a minute? To act on those thoughts? To care in the first place? To be interested in being educated rather than perpetually entertained? I really don't fucking know.

Bookchin is so fucking obsessed with reason as the way forward. I don't totally agree with him. Something else drives revolutionary fervor and a sense of possibility. Katsiaficas calls it 'the eros effect.' I get it and I think there's something to it. But something more needs to actually keep people fighting and that's where I think Bookchin is useful. He wants to think through how do we actually take it a step further in those moments of eros? Richard Day thinks that the 'logic of affinity' means that the distinction between revolution and reform is no longer necessary. I don't agree with that either. I think there is a difference between actions that reform (or retreat) from the existing structure and those that can inform fundamental change. What is it? Is capitalism just so pervasive, so omnipresent in our material, psychological, and social lives that it's just impossible to think and act outside of it for more than a 'temporary autonomous' moment?

why am i an annoying leftist?

I'm not proofreading this. Don't judge me.

I have the best and the worst job. My job right now is to read about social movements and to teach people about the agency they have in their lives. I read from the left. And everyday, despite warnings that when I 'grow up' and have a mortgage (which I do), my politics will somehow soften and I will become less rather than more radical. I've worked in non-profits, I've explored the community service sector, and my analysis only became more radical rather than less. The problems I was addressing - poverty, sexual assault, domestic violence, drug abuse, incarceration - are the logical and systematic outcomes of the inner workings of a social structure designed to marginalize the many at the expense of the few. I scarcely believe, as the logic of survival of the fittest suggests, that those at the top are somehow smarter, better, and more worthy. As I read and think about how popular leftist movements work and what they are fighting for, I become more and more convinced that the world as I see it is common sense; that is, until I read mainstream press or talk to people outside my little bubble of indignation and struggle.

In The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, George Katsiaficas writes, "In short, the conditions of life are being destroyed at the same time as previously independent realms of everyday life are increasingly subsumed by the commodity form and criteria of profitability" (2006: 6). He argues that the rise of autonomous social movements in the 80s in Italy and Germany (he focuses mainly on Germany), was an important, yet under-recognized current of social movements that understood both the state and corporate form as colonizing forces that not only perpetuated all of the -isms that continue to separate and marginalize, but also that increasingly make the psychic and physical landscapes totalizing and seemingly inescapable. He goes on to say, "Privacy continues to be invaded, family life destroyed, job security made non-existent, environmental conditions degraded, water made unfit to drink, and the air made poisonous to our health" (6). These conditions seem inevitable and the solutions remain in the hands and subsumed by the logic of those who created the conditions in the first place. That is, 'the people' let keep reaffirming the hegemony of the powerful.

Sadly, the popular upsurges in the US - the upsurges I follow in the corporate media - are the Tea Party or its 'countermovement' to restore 'sanity.' Neither of these movements are particularly appealing to me (the former, obviously not, and the latter only strategically in this moment). I don't believe in the kind of sanity defined by existing conditions 'cause guess what - existing conditions are totally insane. I don't believe I'll ever see anything close to the kind of world I wish to inhabit. But I will not lay down and I will discuss my logic and I will be called crazy and as much as I feel alienated, I will have a sense of humor about how the world works and continue, like a sad clown, to fight. The contours and intensity of my 'fight' will vary. But fight I will because I think if I sat down with most people and spoke frankly about my beliefs - not my beliefs as issue-based (What should immigration policy look like? Who should have access to health care and how should it be organized?*) - but my pie in the sky beliefs about a totally unattainable world, I am sure, if we suspended our political rationality for just a second, people would say - "Of course, sure, but that's not possible." So what? I'm sure it's not. Just like it's never possible to do a lot of things that we continue to aim for - how to raise the perfect kid, how to have the perfect marriage, the perfect job, the most fully functional economy, a free market - blah blah blah. We aim for the impossible all the time and fail. But we do it.

This system only exists because we allow it to. We accept it and the majority of people, especially in rich western countries, do not try to create new structures based on new logics because they are 'impossible' - people are too selfish (yet we see selflessness all the time in a system that rewards selfishness), it's too hard, it's utopian, you're a 'socialist' (yet people complain about toll roads and the cost of private school). Another world possible - or as David Harvey said, it's coming whether we like it or not. I believe that it can look so so different and that 'different' is actually a sort of common sense that we've been told from the beginning is naive. FUCK that.

Rambly rambly rambly...

*These are all important questions but stay with me for a moment.